Netflix is turning into cable TV::After the loss of behind-the-scenes talent and the acquisition of rights to WWE, Netflix is starting to feel more and more like basic cable.
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It’s easier to find ANY movie or show online than it is to actually take the time to login to netflix
WWE? Lol they think that’s must have TV?
5 billion for ten years? Lolol. Oh my sides. It’s not even an acquisition. It’s 500 million a year for fake wrestling.
fake wrestling
Nitpicking, but it’s meant to be entertainment. You don’t call HBO shows fake drama.
That’s one of the reasons wrestling fans prefer the term scripted or staged as opposed to fake. It still requires tons of athleticism, and lots of wrestlers are still taking very real hits and injuries despite trying to minimize the impacts of them.
Pro wrestling has always been theater’s weird cousin from the other side of the tracks. They’re more alike than fans of either are willing to admit.
Well I can’t call it wrestling, because then what would we call wrestling.
Angry grab ass time
The same thing MMA calls it: catch wrestling.
They’re all linked. They have an evolutionary track.
Fun fact: wrestling started off as a show before it became a sport.
Untrue. Vastly untrue.
What we know as wrestling started off in civil war camps (between battles, Irish soldiers would wrestle each other while the other soldiers would bet on the matches), which eventually turned into a legitimate sport, who’s first World Champion was a man called William Muldoon. Also known as “the solid man”.
What we know as professional wrestling today can be traced back to 1909 with a match between Frank Gotch and George Hackenschmidt, which is considered to be the last legitimate contest for a world title under the banner of “professional wrestling”.
After that we get the rise of the Gold Dust Trio and what we know as “sports entertainment”.
Some people LOVE wrestling.
And it’s a pretty massive audience. This could officially be the end of Netflix as a movie powerhouse, but it isn’t a bad business strategy. Especially with how much they’re raking in from people paying for ads on top of the advertising dollars they’re earning from running them in the first place. They’re phasing out the cheapest ad free option. It’s a big gamble. And, honestly? Fuck ‘em if it doesn’t work. I mean, fuck ‘em if it does work too. I know I don’t personally give a shit about wrestling. (I don’t give a shit about their profits either. They’re not getting my booty. Yo-ho.)
I mean, as shitty as it is, there’s a decent sized market for it. Probably worth it to them to overpay so much for it to hurt the current streaming provider, Peacock.
I think it’s ignorant to call it “shitty” or “fake wrestling”.
Pro-wrestling entertainment is a form of camp theater, like drag shows. It’s an old, cherished artform with a wide, passionate audience that outsiders routinely dismiss because they don’t get it.
I don’t watch it. It doesn’t appeal to me. But I know people who love it. I think it’s largely class elitism that perpetuates the misconception that this form of performance art is somehow unrespectable. It’s not, it’s challenging, dangerous, physically demanding theater.
Edit: For those confused or skeptical, check out Super Eyepatch Wolf’s captivating media analysis “The Undertaker: Long term story telling in wrestling”
Hella based take.
Attitude was the best era also
I would call WWE shitty because of what they do to their performers. The performers are artists and deserve our respect tho.
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?
Well it ain’t wrestling, so it’s fake wrestling. Those are the words I use to describe it. You may think it’s “ignorant” to call it such, but I’m not ignorant of its history or how it’s done (in fact I’ve always been impressed by the athleticism that’s obviously required). So my label isn’t from ignorance.
It’s as lame as soap operas. And I do look down my nose at people who watch that garbage too, or the garbage of most “reality” TV, or melodrama.
It’s all just trite and juvenile appeals to base emotion, nothing more.
There’s not even a wink and a nudge from the actors to the audience.
Any other words you’d like to gatekeep?
You are definitely ignorant to it’s history and execution. That’s not an insult.
But you don’t get to pretend you throughly understand something you admittedly don’t even have any interest in, or have spent any time studying.
It’s not gatekeeping. You’re pretending to know things you don’t have a basic understanding of.
Can’t we have one thread on the Internet where we take the piss out of “manly” men in full costume including tights and makeup throwing each other around and performing “manly” acrobatics / gymnastics without having to bend over for the sanctity of the viewing audience?
I guess not, I guess we have to have a (righteous) turd in every punch bowl.
I mean, you’re trying to shit on an entire form of art and diminish people’s enjoyment of it.
There are countless threads on the internet tearing down wrestling and those who like it. Very few actually have responses like the one you’re replying to.
I mean, you’re trying to shit on an entire form of art and diminish people’s enjoyment of it.
yawn it’s “art” primarily made for people who take daily shits on art being for pussies or pansies or worthless
I understand that there are some versions of it that don’t suck and that not all of the fans are like that…but this is a situation akin to mainstream country music…the current mainstream incarnations of this thing (i.e. the WWE, which is such an impoverished “artist” that it just inked a multi-billion dollar deal with Netflix) are so far removed from the “art” version of the thing that we might as well be talking about different things.
As for “diminishing people’s enjoyment of it”…if you cannot enjoy something despite very mild criticisms of it…you probably didn’t enjoy it that much to begin with. This is Lemmy so I don’t think the two dozen views my posts get will make a big cosmic difference.
Very few actually have responses like the one you’re replying to.
Doubt
I come from Twitter. I’m not sure what your social media background is but there they have a “leave no opportunity for sanctimonious bullshit unexplored” policy.
yawn it’s “art” primarily made for people who take daily shits on art being for pussies or pansies or worthless
Look, I don’t want to bicker, because you seem kind of sensitive about all this, but I just want to point out for anyone unaware, pro wresting is popular with a lot of queer and counterculture folks.
There’s this misconception that it’s for people with confederate flags on the back of pickup trucks. In reality, women consistently make up about 40% of the audience for pro wrestling. They only make up 25% of the audience for MMA.
Also, viewership is about 25% black. That’s a huge over representation compared to national demographics. And it’s popular from Mexico to Japan!
It’s flamboyant musclemen and women hamming it up. If you think that’s all for people who don’t like art and theater, you’re sorely mistaken.
http://indeedwrestling.blogspot.com/2017/06/wwe-demographics-femalemale-split.html —
https://playtoday.co/blog/stats/wwe-viewership-statistics/ —
https://wrestlenomics.com/2022/03/23/race-demographics-in-tv-wrestling-viewership-aew-is-still-behind-wwe-with-black-viewers/I get that it’s not all straight white cis christian males, pretty much nothing is. What I don’t get is why we have to get all worked up about someone making fun of some silly, multi-billion dollar business.
primarily made for people who take daily shits on art being for pussies or pansies or worthless
Okay… have you ever heard of being the bigger person? And this in no way applies to everyone or even the majority of people who enjoy wrestling.
You sound like a grandpa trying to explain to teenagers why rap isn’t music.
Okay… have you ever heard of being the bigger person?
Sure, have you ever heard of being a killjoy?
I understand you have a sort of “not all men” thing going on in this thread because you’re likely a fan of wrestling, but I don’t care.
Maybe you and your friends love purely artisanal, organically grown, farm to table, backyard wrestling…but I’ve bumped into a metric shit ton of absolute douchenozzles that like mainstream wrestling (i.e. the WWE which is what is being discussed anyway) and I don’t care about making fun of it or them for liking it a little.
It’s possible to like something even if you know it sucks. I was a pretty big Coldplay fan for years…I still watch the NFL a bit despite it being basically eagle, beer, betting, army, trucks, Gillette (the best a man can get) for 3.5 hours interrupted by a few seconds of actual gameplay.
It’s possible to see the bad sides of things you enjoy…it’s actually healthy IMO.
You CAN take he piss out of anything you want. It’s just that if your take is uninformed, don’t grouse when someone says, ‘Oh! Here’s some context so you can know more about this thing! Enjoy knowing something new!’
The Internet is just full of annoying nags about every single issue. In one thread on here today I bumped into a guy who claimed to be pro-“eat the rich” at the same time as he was against asking them pointed questions. People just love to be holier than thou or contrarian or both I suppose. 🤷
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You understand there are other people in the world besides yourself that have different interests than you, right?
You don’t have to like it, but just FYI, the market doesn’t care about your feelings. Professional wrestling is a worldwide phenomenon, especially in Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East.
The UFC merged with the WWE this year, and UFC fighters routinely show up to WWE events. Real professional fighters don’t seem to care that it’s scripted
Just because it’s something you don’t like, doesn’t make it not worth an insane amount of money.
There’s a reason why WWE is not only still around, but worth more today than it was in it’s “heyday”.
You’re laughing because someone bought a proven market. It’s literally the same as Marvel, Star Wars, or any other market.
That’s nice you think you understand what a valuable acquisition is.
I think you’re applying your own viewpoint here to the general public.
I don’t enjoy wrestling. I also don’t enjoy reality TV, teen dramas, horror shows, or European Football. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have value.
If TV needs to provide some infallible, logical benefit to be worth something, then every show is in trouble. It’s practically all made up stories about nothing that matters.
This is one of the narrow times that “the customer is always right” applies correctly. It doesn’t matter if it’s “good” by any one person’s definition. If people watch, it has value.
I’d pay good money to see high quality Starcraft 2 tournaments on TV. I doubt many other people would. That’s how value is determined.
“IT’S STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT”
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So I was listening to a Bloomberg Tech Podcast about this. Someone from some random media group actually said “consumer demand for ad supported content over netflix’s usual high production value dramas is up”
For some reason, that statement was both incredibly threatening and incredibly ominous
That doesn’t even make sense. The high production stuff would be ad supported too.
The whole fucking internet is, really.
Just cancelled today after not even using it for a year.
Protip: always cancel immediately after subscribing. Only resubscribe if there is something you actually wanna watch. And cancel immediately again. And so on. This way you will never pay for not using it.
Let me rephrase as I guess I was a bit unclear. I’ve had Netflix since 2012 but just cancelled it today after not using it for almost the entirety of 2023.
Still a great tip you’ve given, not trying to detract from that. That’s what I do with most services but for some reason just took forever to pull the trigger on cancelling Netflix.
Protip: Just use free streaming services like fmovies.
Just cancelled today after not even using it for a year.
How can you be so dumb to pay for something you don’t even use? No shit they’re rich af 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Busy life. Demanding job. Tons of different bills so it just blends in. Shit just gets lost in the shuffle sometimes man.
I watched it a handful of times but not enough to justify keeping it.
And it’s the cost of a beer at a bar…for a month of watching.
In my country, a beer is 1€ lol. Netflix is 20€
Hi friend, what are the immigration policies for your country? Asking for myself
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For me, it’s the DRM that’s killing streaming. If I can’t put it on Discord so my wife and I can watch it while hanging out online, I’ll just pick something else or find another way to watch it.
I mean, can’t you use something like Teleparty to sync up streams in both your browsers? Then just voice chat in Discord.
Looks like that would work. Sucks to have to use an extra bit of machinery to restore a feature that they intentionally broke though. It’s like they view their customers as the enemy.
Huge eyeroll. There was a writers strike. To make up for all the new content that’s not available, Netflix acquired a bunch of old stuff that may be new to subscribers.
Old stuff was exactly why I originally subscribed to Netflix back in the day. I’m not going back to check now but I’d consider a deep well of older content to be a good thing on a streaming service.
YouTubeTV and Hulu + Live TV already literally stream cable. Can’t get closer to basic cable than that, lol. That said, remains to be seen whether Netflix is one of the services that survives the drastic market correction I think will happen eventually.
We really turned full circle.
Its worse than them becoming cable tv: They’re BORING tv now. I imagine a large segment comes and goes when Stranger Things releases, which is a bad read. Less than a decade ago, we all saw Netflix as the second coming of HBO. Now its just bad tv.
Also I figured the rates would go up after the WWE deal, and I was right: they axed the lowest ad tier the day after.
I resub for Stranger things and then I unsub. Simple.
Newsflash: they all are.
It’s funny, when I was a young adult I turned my parents on to Netflix and away from cable. And now I’m trying to get them off Netflix
I fundamentally agree with the premise of the article, but did anyone else find it strange how much the writer mentioned the show Suits?
The thesis from my skim pf the article was just that Netflix is shifting from weird/experimental award bait to the sort of normie stuff you’d see on TNT, USA, or other mainstream/non-niche basic cable.
With Suits being a quintessential example of such a turn.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Netflix’s days of chasing prestige might be rapidly coming to an end with this sharp reversal of the streaming golden age replaced by something akin to Spike TV circa 2005.
“This should add some fuel to our new and growing ad business,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in an earnings call after the announcement.
But, if it doesn’t, then spending $5 billion to secure the rights for WWE Monday Night Raw for the next ten years means Netflix subscribers could see another price hike in their future — whether they like wrestling or not.
So it’s got whatever this long-delayed and troubled adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender is, but also Young Sheldon and Suits, and a wealth of foreign language programming.
You make money spending less on it than your originals, the place you’re buying from gets to have it on their service, too, and everyone looks nice and friendly and competitive in case the FTC comes around.
Eventually, this strategy of Netflix’s — to rely on its size, content bought from other streamers, and a graveyard of prematurely canceled originals — could struggle.
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